Few of us make plans for our lives with our own deaths in mind, so perhaps it’s not surprising that architects don’t usually spend much of the design process thinking about the virtually inevitable demolition of their creations. It might seem as morbid and premature as college graduates making plans for their own funerals, but considering the entire life cycle of a structure before it’s even built could have a massive impact on the amount of waste we generate – and help us adapt to the uncertain conditions of the future.

Though some buildings and infrastructure may stand for many hundreds of years, the vast majority of it is rendered obsolete in a matter of decades. Practical needs and aesthetic preferences change, and materials wear down. Currently, about 80% of all materials and minerals in circulation in the U.S. economy are consumed by the construction industry, and about 70% of construction waste is concrete.

In 2010, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency determined that an estimated 104 million tons of materials were sent to landfills from project sites around the country, and 92% of that waste came from demolitions and renovations. Construction debris often contains lead, asbestos, mercury, arsenic and other hazardous substances, and modern composite materials aren’t necessarily much better for human health and the environment.

In the United States, where the average life span of highway bridges is about 70 years and the majority of bridges currently in use were built in 1945, we’re in dire need of a refresh, but all those crumbling structures will have to go somewhere. When the old east span of the Bay Bridge in Oakland, California was replaced, Caltrans took care to dismantle it so some parts could be reused in creative new ways, but the project still produced tons of lead-contaminated hazardous materials that were then sent to a landfill. What if the bridge – and others like it – had been designed with components that could easily be dismantled and reused for other projects?

A movement called Design for Deconstruction (DfD), sometimes called Design for Disassembly, proposes the research and development of new structural system concepts that facilitate truly sustainable construction through the assessment of a project’s entire life cycle. That means there’s a way to reuse or recycle every component of a structure using existing recycling streams. Spearheaded by architect and building scientist Bradley Guy, DfD offers a collection of design principles that aim for prefabrication, pre-assembly and modular construction, simplified connection details and building systems, minimized parts and materials, ease of disassembly, flexibility and adaptability, the use of reusable materials and considerations for worker safety.

Design for Deconstruction was first defined in the 1990s, but the general concept has existed for much longer. The Crystal Palace at Sydenham is an early example, built in Hyde Park, London to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Made of cast iron and plate glass, the 990,000-square-foot building with an interior height of 128 feet was designed to be temporary, simple, cheap and easy to transport. Its modular panels were packed up and moved to South London for reassembly, and it remained there until its destruction by fire in 1936.

One of the most important factors in DfD is the longevity of the materials. There are lots of temporary structures out there, built to be disassembled and transported, but few of them are designed to last, and they rarely even come close to approaching the scale of The Crystal Palace. Equally crucial is follow-through, as proven by a recent project in Brazil. Like most structures built for the Olympic Games, the Rio 2016 Olympic Handball Arena was a prime candidate for experimental methods of reuse. At the start of the project, Brazil’s economy was booming, but by 2014, the country was in the grips of a recession. Plans to dismantle the Arena and transform it into four primary schools never came to fruition, and now it’s rotting along with the rest of the city’s Olympic structures – the very fate its architects hoped to avoid.

But when it’s done right, Design for Deconstruction has the potential to revolutionize the future of architecture. Closed-loop construction systems don’t just have a lower ecological footprint, they encourage innovation and produce unique aesthetics. Two houses by architecture firm Kieran Timberlake give us a glimpse of what this could look like. Loblolly House, built in 2006, takes inspiration from treehouses in its design and construction, with pre-built modules and “cartridges” that connect with simple hand tools. Cellophane House was assembled like a car, with the entire construction process broken down into integrated assemblies that were constructed off site, delivered by trailers and stacked with a crane. It was built for exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

“Materials were selected to be lightweight, minimizing embodied energy, and reusable within existing recycling streams. The same aluminum frame used for Loblolly House was scaled up from two stories to five, enabled by a strengthening system of custom-designed steel connectors. The SmartWrap skin was attached to that frame, with interior floors, ceilings, and partitions made of structural plastic. The skin was envisioned as a filter, selectively letting in daylight and seasonal heat and keeping out UV light and hot or cold air, depending on the season.”

“The final experiment at MoMA was its disassembly. The house was deglazed, un-stacked, and disassembled at ground level using basic handheld tools. Parts were organized on pallets and removed from the site in two days. Virtually no waste was generated, and 100 percent of the energy embodied in materials was recovered. The only remnant was a patch of gravel in an asphalt lot.”

Other recent examples include Kengo Kuma’s Jenga-like Cafe Kureon, the Pop-Up House by Multipod Studio and ‘A Simple Factory Building’ by Pencil Office, which features a pollution-filtering facade, aluminum window walls and reinforced concrete construction designed to be fully recycled at the end of its 33-year lease period.

Iranian architect Mahshid Fadaei’s ‘Design for Deconstruction Housing for Working Class’ envisions an 800-unit complex set within a fully recyclable frame that uses easily replaced modular housing pods connecting to each other with a non-rigid plug-and-play system. While shipping containers are an obvious choice for this sort of system, they have some constraints that make them less than ideal in certain applications, making purpose-built pods an attractive option.

Architect William McDonough, champion of ‘Cradle to Cradle design’ – which considers the full lifecycle of consumer products – integrates his drive for smart sustainability into his own projects. His firm completed the NASA Sustainability Base (pictured top), a 50,000-square-foot, lunar-shaped complex housing 200 staff designed with a plan for how every last component will be dealt with at the end of the building’s life (which is, McDonough notes, probably far into the future.)

Since Design for Deconstruction is still in its youth, we’ve yet to see many real-life examples of its end game in action. But as climate change and other factors call the conditions of the next century into question, architecture that’s made to be as adaptable, versatile and reusable as possible could help us weather whatever is to come, and finding a way to reign in our burgeoning landfills is a no-brainer.

Cracked open like a coat (or pair of pants), the walls of this structure in England, have been opened up to expose its abandoned interior ahead of its scheduled demolition.

“Open to the Public” is an art installation by Alex Chinneck located in Kent that deconstructs a mid-century tannery to create a mind-bending, giant-sized illusion of flexibility alongside solid surfaces.

Wood columns, glass windows and plaster walls all seem to bend and morph in uncanny ways. Along one face, the building is zipped down the center — along another, a zipper seems to slide sideways just below the roof.

The artist describes the work as “theatrical and surreal,” and notes that the zipper approach is a nod to the clothing that was fabricated inside the architectural shell.

“When introducing a narrative, we take complex paths to get to simple moments, which are quite accessible and conceptually light – we kept it playful with the zipping element.” This is also not his first deconstruction project.

Sure, Brutalist architecture is divisive, but does that mean we should be wiping it all off the face of the planet? It’s true that these structures are rarely beloved by the residents of their locales; they’re often derided as ‘monstrosities’ with their blocky proportions and large swaths of concrete surfaces. That makes them a major target of trigger-happy developers eager to treat architecture that’s just a few decades old like it’s disposable, making way for new models that will likely be torn down in even less time.

We’re all familiar with planned obsolescence by now, and it’s not surprising to see a lot of the cheaper, flimsier structures of the recent past fall to the wrecking ball – but Brutalist buildings, by their very nature, could stand for centuries if well maintained. Alas, many of them are already gone, and a new series of photographs entitled ‘Brutal Destruction’ captures them in mid-demolition.

Architect Chris Grimley of multidisciplinary design firm Over,Under curated the exhibition, opening this week at Boston’s Pinkcomma gallery. Each building is captured in a raw state of traumatic injury, halfway between existence and nonexistence, and looking at them, you get the sense that people are either cheering for their destruction or mourning their loss, with few feelings in the midrange.

Grimley himself is certainly among the latter. Along with his colleagues at Over,Under, the architect has helmed a number of Brutalism-centric projects, including the book Heroic: Concrete Architecture and the New Boston and a map of Brutalist Boston produced in collaboration with Blue Crow Media. Judging by the rate at which these structures are disappearing, that map may already be out of date.

Grimley notes that, even in our contempt for ‘ugly’ Brutalist buildings, we’re being a tad hasty. After all, previous generations tore down Victorian architecture because it was ‘out of date,’ and the window by which something becomes outmoded grows shorter every year.

“We get caught up in notions of what is considered beautiful,” he says. “By the time things are allowed to be considered beautiful again, it’s often too late.”

What if, after the demolition of a neglected building, all that was left behind was the leafy exoskeleton of ivy that once grew up its outer walls? As shanty towns all along the Yuan River in the Hunan province of China are dismantled, a piece of them remains behind, paying tribute to their historical value in this setting. V Studio presents ‘Home for Boston Ivy,’ a recreation of these building-shaped ivy structures in metal, which will serve as a trellis for real ivy in the future. These welded shapes will be placed within the new, modernized version of the city so future inhabitants can get a sense of its past.

“Houses being covered with Boston ivy can be seen everywhere in shanty towns,” they explain. “While presenting a picture of harmonious coexistence between human and nature, it is also the memory of a home for residents of shanty towns. When the ivy attaches to the building and grows, it forms the turns and enclosures of the space. V Studio’s artwork has pulled away the building which the plant has attached to, and left only the Boston ivy with twisted roots and gnarled branches in the shape of the building.”

V Studio previously completed a series of sculptures relating to the same theme, all using materials from the same site in the Hunan Changde Yuanshui right bank shantytowns. ‘Sealing’ preserved building debris in a collection of cubes that function as urban seating; information about each home that was demolished is imprinted on the cement that contains the debris.

“At present, the shantytowns are being demolished,” they say (translated from Chinese.) “In the near future, a modernized metropolis will completely cover the area and all that is available here will cease to exist. How to preserve the emory of the old city and inject the memory of the origin into the new town in the process of demolishing the old building and building a new one is the basic starting point for the creation of the series of works.”

Going forward, buildings may not need to go out with a bang if this “non-explosive cracking agent” takes off. The destructive action is quieter and potentially cleaner way to take out structures, break down old infrastructure or excavate building sites.

Betonamit is boasted to be a non-toxic powder that, when mixed with water and poured in to drilled holes, much like TNT, but instead of exploding, it “hardens and expands, exerting pressures of 12,000 psi. Reinforced concrete, boulders, and ledge are fractured overnight with no noise, vibration, or flyrock.” It’s not the only such stuff, but claims to be the first (other brands include the cleverly-named Crackamite).

Like some kind of anti-concrete, the dry powder is mixed with water — thus activated, it is poured into place. It is advertised for indoor use, as well as bridges, dams, limestone, boulders and concrete slabs. Seems like great stuff for large-scale artwork of some kind, but there don’t appear to be many such applications as yet.

Geoff Manaugh of BldgBlog wonders, though, what happens when something goes wrong. He writes: “I’m imagining a truck full of this stuff overturning on a crack-laden bridge somewhere, just an hour before a rainstorm begins, or a storage yard filled with crates of this stuff being ripped apart in the summer wind; a seemingly innocuous grey powder drifts out across an entire neighborhood for the next few hours, settling down into cracks on brick rooftops and stone facades, in sidewalks and roadbeds. Then the rains begin. The city crumbles. Weaponized demolition powder.”